Survivors

The other day, I came across a tin of powdered butter that I’d stored in my basement five years ago as part of an emergency cache. All I needed to do was add 27 cups of water and — voila! — I’d have a huge amount of peculiar-tasting buttery substance with which to adorn my bread and Kraft Dinner while I waited out an influenza pandemic in a pristine state of self-quarantine.

Not that one ever materialized. But it might have.

There is nothing inherently irrational about vigilance. Disasters happen.

In 2006, as you will probably not recall, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued a bulletin via a Web site called pandemicflu.gov (now, the less menacing flu.gov), advising the citizenry to stockpile six to eight weeks’ worth of supplies. Just in case. You never knew. There might be a global pandemic at any time, and if there was, then influenza could — what? — level the sales staff at Trader Joe’s, and there would be no one left to sell you your food.

This was before Steven Soderbergh’s movie “Contagion” came out, and made it thoroughly, unnervingly obvious to all that a mutated flu virus could spark a global disease catastrophe necessitating prolonged self-quarantine. In 2006, none of my friends had the faintest apprehension that a time of great peril was approaching. They hunkered down with their proven pleasures — “American Idol,” Jazzercise — while I, alone, stood guard.
Anxious people can get their timing wrong, I’ll grant you, but, still, we act as scouts along the periphery of the human campfire, scanning for threats in the darkness. We are the watchers. Scoff if you will. Some of us are self-appointed and others are professional. Our vigilance can be critical, in some instances, to everyone’s safety. It can also be wildly and hilariously irrelevant. The special magic trick is to know which is which.

John Malta

There is nothing inherently irrational about vigilance. Disease outbreaks, climate disturbances, nuclear Armageddon — all are entirely plausible scenarios. A whole class of paid worriers must go about the thankless task of monitoring such scenarios: oceanographers watching sea levels, anti-terrorism experts trawling the Internet, geologists keeping an eye on the super volcano under Yellowstone National Park that has the potential to erupt and kill us all.

The calamitous prospects are legion, which was very likely the calculus of producers at Spike Television, who have just announced a new reality show called “Last Family On Earth.” Survivalists will compete for the prize of a furnished, underground bunker in an undisclosed location. (You could also win this prize by becoming vice president, but you wouldn’t get to skin a squirrel.)

Many will receive this news with arched eyebrows, but really: are the burgeoning number of American “preppers” wrong to be getting prepared? Are the anxious wrong to be scouting? In this culture, that question is never comfortably settled.

The challenge, I think, has less to do with anticipating the threats than with shaping a healthy and judicious response.

At some point, in preparing for the 2006 flu pandemic, I began to realize that I was coping with anxiety through a process that the Italian psychologist Maria Miceli has called “hypothetical analytical planning.” This is where you lie in bed at night and run through as many prospective scenarios as you can imagine, and then rehearse them backwards, or in Spanish. It’s obsessive.

“One’s power over events is closely dependent on one’s power to foresee,” Miceli, of Rome’s Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technology, has written about this kind of anxiety, “because ‘if I cannot foresee, I cannot act.’” It is, in essence, a kind of magical thinking that masquerades as rational.

Indeed, we value it highly in certain work settings, such as airport security. The anxious person proceeds in the laborious task of formulating various hypotheses about all the possible courses that events could take. The trouble is that since those courses are pretty much infinite, the anxiety is never quelled and simply deepens, like grooves being laid down in vinyl.

Thus I would find myself, late at night, compiling my order list from a Web site called Survival Acres and wondering: ‘What if I can’t fit the powdered butter and dehydrated dinners into my car, along with our dogs and children? Will we stay here, in the basement, rather than flee to the country? If the dogs need to go out, how will they come back in without bringing the virus into the house on their feet? What if they step in bird feces? Shall I purchase booties?”

It is the conviction that all — every single angle — must be foreseen that can turn heightened vigilance into a dizzying cognitive spiral. There is no reason to assume that institutions and professions are any more exempt from the spiral than individuals, which is how we wind up with infants on no-fly lists, and people being patted down due to pacemakers.

Related

Last week, a friend of mine who has been fretting about changes to “space weather,” alerted me to a planning conference in Washington on June 5th, organized by the Office of the Federal Coordinator for Meteorological Services and Supporting Research.

My friend (and presumably the conference attendees) has been keeping abreast of solar storms and other features of space weather for several years now, and is increasingly concerned that civilization is about to be destroyed by a lick of flame from the star that has always sustained us. But what can he do? What, really, can anyone do about that? He mused briefly about moving his family to Cape Breton, a sparsely populated island off the coast of Nova Scotia, where one assumes there will be fewer post-apocalyptic gangs.

How much control does he have, though, I found myself asking him, and what is it that he’s trying to assert control over? Everything? Every conceivable turn of events? That is a very, very difficult question for anxious people and societies to solve in a satisfactory way.

All the food I ordered from Survival Acres proved useless when my father and sister died two years later from, respectively, heart disease and cancer. Yes, I had persuaded my sister to stockpile a natural anti-viral syrup derived from blackberries that I’d read about on the Internet when I was doing all this planning for the flu. And yes, it was still in her kitchen cupboard when we had her funeral.

A few months after Dad and Katharine died, I contracted the H1N1 virus, which I used as a very good excuse to stay in bed.

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We worry. Nearly one in five Americans suffer from anxiety. For many, it is not a disorder, but a part of the human condition. This series explores how we navigate the worried mind, through essay, art and memoir.